The New York Times
April 12, 2005 Tuesday
Late Edition – Final

Currency Is Music in East-West Exchange

By ALLAN KOZINN

Much of Yo-Yo Ma’s musical effort and imagination since 1998 has been
put at the service of his Silk Road Project, a series of concerts and
discs meant to revive and update the kind of cultural interchange
that occurred on the ancient trade route between Asia and Europe. As
a way to prevent his career from devolving into a routine of touring
with the same crowd-pleasing cello works over and over — however
sublimely Mr. Ma would have played them — it has been a brilliant
move.

The Silk Road, after all, is a perfect metaphor for the exchange he
is seeking, not only between Eastern and Western musicians, but also
between traditional and contemporary styles — and, judging from the
copious materials in the program book, between Western and Asian
archaeologists and historians. Even if the venue for this exchange is
now the recording studio and the concert stage rather than the Silk
Road itself, it was clear from the sheer joy of the music making on
Sunday evening at Carnegie Hall that the polystylistic dialogue Mr.
Ma is overseeing is as enlivening for the players as for the
listeners.

The stage arrangement, at the start of the concert, emphasized the
East-meets-West aspect of the project. Mr. Ma sat to one side of the
stage with the makings of a string quartet, plus a double bass and a
pipa (a Chinese lute). Across the way were three percussionists who
played Asian and African drums, and a performer on the duduk (an
Armenian reed instrument). Between them were performers playing a
kamancheh (an Iranian spike fiddle), a tar (an Azerbaijani lute) and
a tabla (an Indian drum).

The concert was at its best when the music was presented on its own
terms. That happened mainly in a set of pieces from Azerbaijan, sung
with passion and dramatic flair by Alim Qasimov, and accompanied by
Malik Mansurov on the tar and Rauf Islamov on the kamancheh.

Where musics were encouraged to meet, the encounters were sometimes
odd, and some worked better than others. When Wu Man played an
eighth-century pipa theme to introduce Zhao Jiping’s ”Sacred Cloud
Music,” a Western listener could not help but note a similarity to
the Dies Irae plainchant and when the strings joined, it was in a
chord progression that could have been borrowed from the Renaissance
— or, for that matter, from a contemporary mystic like Arvo Part.
Gevorg Dabaghyan’s duduk line in a set of Armenian folk melodies
captured the music’s soulful, lachrymose qualities so beautifully
that the string quartet accompaniment sounded contrived.

Perhaps the strangest instrumental combination was a set of Gypsy
dances at the end of the program, scored for strings, percussion and,
of all things, pipa, with solos all around. But the sheer virtuosity,
energy and inventiveness of the performances made it work.

There is a degree to which Mr. Ma’s project is also a stealth
new-music series, and Sunday’s program included several contemporary
scores that draw on Asian traditional themes and, at times, timbres.
”Mountains Are Far Away,” by Kayhan Kalhor, an Iranian composer,
proved a zesty opener, and the works by Zhao Jiping and Zhao Lin
(father and son) were seductively supple. The major modern offering,
though, was Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s ”Mugam Sayagi,” a 1993 work for
string quartet and percussion that ranges from quasi-Minimalist
meditation to vigorous, spiky harmonies and that has an intensity
matching that of the traditional Azerbaijani music from which it drew
its inspiration.